Postscript printer, serial or parallel cable?

[Scott W]

Doug Poland wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I recently got my hands on a free (woowho!) HP 4050 printer.  I'm
>going to hook it up to a FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE server.  The printer has
>two serial (one male/one female) connectors, a Centronix port, and
>some odd looking port that looks like you plug a mouse into it.
>
>The handbook states that I can use serial or parallel cabling to a
>postscript capable printer but there may be some advantage to a serial
>cable as it is bi-directional.  I've got several newer IEEE
>something-or-another parallel cables lying around unused.   They were
>rather expensive and, IIRC, proported to be bi-directional.
>
>Question:  Is a serial hookup preferable to parallel?  As a future
>possiblity, this modest FBSD box may become a dedicated print server
>with a color laser and ink jet also hanging off it.  I'll probably
>install CUPS and "share" it with windows users via Samba.
>
>Thanks for your input
>
>  
>
If I'm not totally mistaken (been a while since I've used a serial 
printer for anything), the parallel should be a fair amount quicker- the 
only thing I remember about the serials is it was easier/cheaper to find 
long serial cables, which was important when a server in the server room 
or on another floor was doing print server duties for a printer in a 
publicly accessible area....

Any reasonably modern parallel cable and parallel port is also 
bi-directional, so the only advantage I see with serial is if you're 
cabling it like above...

Scott